Saturday, 23 June 2012

Some really rough notes. Suggestions welcome.

Notable people who use Linux (with additional notes on Emacs and TeX users), a first draft.

My rough criterion for determining who counts as "famous": does the person have a Wikipedia entry?

Presumably many more can be added under "computer-related" (which is why I put it at the bottom). I'm only listing each person once, under most relevant/salient category (otherwise I could, for instance, list Shuttleworth also under an "astronaut" category).

position on piracy: "If you've downloaded unauthorized copies of my books, instead of hitting
on a tipjar button, I urge you to buy a (new) copy of one of my books....Your typical book publisher is not like the music or movie industry;
they run on thin margins, and they're staffed by underpaid, overworked
folk who do it because they love books, not because they're trying to
make themselves rich on the back of a thousand ruthlessly exploited
artists. I think their effort deserves to be rewarded appropriately..." [1]

some recognition of danger of censoring internet: "THE WEEK had an item on Internet piracy of music, books, and movies, and efforts to stop it. I have discussed this here before, but it bears repeating: pirates are thieves who are destroying the ability of creative artists to make a living, myself included; a LOT of my works are chronically stolen. The pirates need to be stopped. The problem is how to do it without censoring free expression itself. I think there does have to be a law, but one carefully crafted to shut down only the pirates." (2012) [1]

Some Initial Ruminations

A number of the people above fall into two rough groupings: "technology/gadget-lovers" vs. "ideological-users". So Stephen Fry and Wil Wheaton would fall into the first category, as would perhaps Charlie Stross and even Linus Torvalds. On the ideological side are (of course) Richard Stallman, Cory Doctorow, Piers Anthony, and the Pirate Party MPs. Anthony's position in the latter grouping is interesting, given his position on piracy. Stallman's position is similar to the Pirate MPs in certain respects, but values the legal status of copyleft.

Hattrick winners and other random notes

Amelia Andersdotter, Donald Knuth, and Richard Stallman take hattrick prizes for Linux-Emacs-TeX use. (For an extra bonus, Andersdotter also explicitly mentions use of org-mode in Emacs.)

Of course there are various connections between some of the characters mentioned above. For instance, Doctorow releases his novels under Lessig's Creative Common licences; Doctorow & Stross are co-writing a novel [1]; etc.

In terms of the general public, the actors are (unsurprisingly) probably the best known: I would guess Stephen Fry is the most famous person listed above.

Tuesday, 19 June 2012

Emacs 24.1 is out. I haven't really tried it properly yet. All of the pre-release Emacs 24 snapshots I tried had severe memory-leak problems (at least with my set-up) and the quick try-out of 24.1 I did do revealed that it seems to be incompatible with twittering-mode. Since Emacs 23.3 is still working nicely for me, perhaps I'll wait a bit before trying 24.1 seriously.

Emacs ... will be there when the icecaps
melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and
zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and
begin using computers themselves - at which point its various Ctrl-Meta
key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical
arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe's Intelligent
Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.

About this blog

Posts on a variety of topics, including steam-powered analytical engines, Linux, (La)TeX, and Emacs. Some posts are musings, some are hacks for getting things to work right, some are useful tips I came across or came up with, some are links to topics of interest.